The pursuers were still coming on, but did not appear to be distressing themselves.  Probably they felt so secure of their prey that they could afford to be moderately cautious in the midst of these fog wreaths that made river travelling somewhat perilous.  Cuthbert shipped his oars and sprang lightly ashore, leaving the wherry to its fate.  Then he raced like a hunted hare along the margin of the river, and before five minutes had passed he had scrambled up and leaped the wall of this lonely river-side house, and was crouching breathless and exhausted in a thick covert upon the farther side, straining his ears for sounds of pursuit.

These were not long in coming.  He heard regular steps approaching the wall, and a voice said: 

“Here are the tracks.  He got over here.  Follow, and find him now.  He is in a trap!”

“Am I indeed in a trap?” thought Cuthbert, setting his teeth hard; “that remains to be proved!”

And gliding out from the covert with that noiseless movement he had learned during his residence in the forest, he raced like a veritable shadow in the direction of the house.

He had reached the building rising black and grim against the darkening sky; he had almost laid his hand upon the knocker, intending to make known his presence and his peril, and demand admittance and speech with Master Robert Catesby, when forth from the shadows of the porch stepped a tall dark figure, and he felt a shiver of dismay run through him as a loaded pistol was levelled at his head.

“It is the spy again—­the spy I have sworn to sweep from our path.  False Trevlyn, thine hour has come!”

A puff of smoke—­a loud report.  Cuthbert had flung up his hand to shield his face, for the barrel was aimed straight at his temple.  He was conscious of a sudden stinging pain in his wrist.  A momentary giddiness seized him, and he stumbled and fell.  A sardonic laugh seemed to ring in his ears.  He thought he heard the banging of a door and the drawing of heavy bolts.  Probably the man who had fired was so certain of his aim that he did not even pause to see how the shot had told.

“Your tongue will not wag again before the morrow!”

Those words seemed to be ringing in Cuthbert’s ears, and then for a moment all was blackness and darkness, with a sense of distress and suffocation and stabs of sudden pain.

When he awoke from what he first thought had been a nightmare dream, he was puzzled indeed to know where he was, and for a while believed that he was dreaming still, and that he should soon awake to find himself in his little attic chamber in the bridge house.  But as his senses gradually cleared themselves he became aware that he was in no such safe or desirable spot.  He was lying on some cloaks in the bow of a large boat, which was being rowed steadily and silently up stream by four stalwart men.  The daylight was gone, but so too was the fog, and the moon was shining